How to Choose How You Want to Feel

Breandan and Emma, a couple up the hill from me in Sausalito, have been married 54 years, they proudly told me last year. They walked, hand in hand, past my home each morning, usually laughing, smiling and pointing out new flower blossoms and other things along the way. Originally from Ireland, they listened, in bed, to BBC News at dawn, so they usually had a tidbit of news to share with me if they happened to pass my home when I was finishing my lame attempt at morning exercises in the backyard.

When Emma died suddenly, Breandan stopped walking. He stayed inside their home and ignored my knock on their door. Several times.

Later, when he started walking again, he told me his son, a motivational speaker on leadership, suggested that he start saying positive self-affirmations every morning “to lift his mood.”

He retorted, “My mood doesn’t need lifting! It’s right where it’s supposed to be.” So his well-intentioned son then mailed him a card deck with cheery faces on one side and, on the other, a series of upbeat daily affirmations. The card pack was entitled “Yes, I Can!” to which Breandan hotly responded (to me, but not his son, I gather): “No I won’t!”

Write Yourself Through Your Journey to a Better Emotional Place

That gift inspired Breandan to take action, but not in the way his son intended. He began writing his own card deck, a collection of “realistic affirmations.” I figured that the sentiments reflected his way of responding to grief, his stubborn resistance to being told to feel better and his core attitude about living life as it happens. Some were darkly funny. Yet his basic resilience started to shine through as he finished writing his sayings by the end of the year. “Not every cloud has a silver lining, so start liking the clouds.”

I thought of Breandan when I read that Norman Vincent Peale may have been wrong, at least for some people, when he advocated saying positive self-affirmations to lift your mood. That’s a startling revelation for many of us Americans who have been bombarded with self-help messages based on the belief that positive affirmations are entirely beneficial.

“Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, such as those with high self-esteem, but backfire for the very people who need them the most,” concludes social psychology professor Dr. Joanne Wood, and others. Even those with high self-esteem felt only slightly better after repeating a positive self-statement. And when someone is going through grief, acting extremely cheerful towards them can backfire..

Those are startling revelations for many of us Americans who have been bombarded with self-help messages based on the belief that positive affirmations are always beneficial. The news gets worse for those with a low self-image. Wood and her colleagues found:

• “People with high self-esteem are more likely than those with low self-esteem to try to improve their moods when they are sad, as well as to savor their moods when they are happy.”

Don’t Fight Those Feelings; Instead, Notice Them, Then Choose What to Feel

Like obsessing more about the elephant in the room after being told to ignore it, being told to repeat “get happy” sayings when sad can make us feel even more sad. As Ed Yong concluded, “Statements that contradict a person’s self-image, no matter how rallying in intention, are likely to boomerang.”

Instead of trying to change your feelings (as cognitive therapy attempts to do), change how you choose to view your thoughts. That approach calls on us to be mindfully observing what we are thinking and feeling from a calm pool, so to speak, without getting repeatedly sucked into the downward swirl of them.

As Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.”

Practicing this way, we can notice what’s without immediately reacting, thus become better to choose how we want to react. This approach is called ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. To reinforce that practice, “think of yourself as a kind friend,” suggests Duke University psychology professor Mark Leary. That bolsters your self-compassion and thus your happiness. “One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt,” Alan Watts wrote.

Breandan, by the way, has begun writing his memoir, describing some of the adventures he shared with Emma, the people they met and the joy of living with her “through thick and thin.” His writing enables him to take the ACT approach, to observing and accept his sadness at his wife’s passing and to choose to focus, instead, on the many of the happy times they enjoyed together.

He showed me the quote he chose for the first page: “In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived. How well we have loved. How well we have learned to let go.” ~ Jack Kornfield.